My Life with ZoneTag
On my recent trip to Greece with my wife to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, I made myself one promise: I would not use the Web for the whole week. By and large, I kept this promise, however I was not completely off the grid. While we were island hopping, I was snapping pictures with my N73 and using Zonetag to send them up to FlickR. The results are available here. ZoneTag is a nifty downloadable application and service, developed by Yahoo! Research, which allows you to (among other things) upload images directly to FlickR from your camera phone. Of course, there are plenty of applications that allow you to do this, but the ZoneTag difference is that by using the CellID, and cross-referencing this against a database of CellIDs that they maintain, ZoneTag can accurately geotag your photos even if your device doesn’t have a a GPS built in. ZoneTag also learns CellID locations through users using the system and telling it their location. It’s “leveraging collective intelligence.” Anyway, apart from being a bit of geeky fun, there was a method to this madness. Publishing these photos allowed our kids (being looked after by my saintly mother and sister) to keep track of our travels. It was like being able to send postcards instantaneously. And unlike MMS, sending an image with Zonetag does not compress / reduce the images to the Nth degree – the original images with their original detail are sent up. Now, granted this is the Greek islands and you can pretty …